Shelling Peas While Watching the News

I’m shelling new spring peas while watching,
slicing the sturdy pods open with my thumbnail
designed specifically for this.
Six to eight peas in a pod, some hanging in opposition
others in a tightly packed line-up seeming uncomfortable.
The grassy smell places me in some bee-buzzed garden
where they dangled just before, being aborted from their
fetal-hold to join the company of others in the pail
robbed of light in that dark chamber deprived of sun.

The somber-faced news anchors, smartly jacketed
and well-coifed also gather in their respective pods,
delivering the latest breaking that had indeed broken
yesterday but deserves repetition all day, all night long:

the war crimes of the nation that commits atrocities,
photos that we might find disturbing but they are compelled
to show, as if we cannot imagine the horror of the motherless
child crying in the street of rubble and other dead innocents.

I lower my eyes to my task and watch as one by one
the peas plop into the colander as I drop them, their
numbers accumulate verdant as the color of Scotland’s
emerald hills where I am transported against the admonition,
Don’t Look Away, but I do.

I turn off the TV and take the colander and the remainder
of the unopened pods to the back porch where back in
the day Ma showed me how to shell them, catching
the pods in her ample apron as the spring breeze carried
our voices across the newly budded grapevine-trellised yard.

We only thought it was better then: The contained Cold War,
the yet unmasked differences threatening democracy, but it
was because there was so much less for us to hear or see.
The news broke often without us knowing it for days.
Now it is our unalienable right to know it all, often in
its fearful and grim immediacy. We mourn, helpless.

Later I steam the peas in a little water and when tender
add sweet butter with barely a dash of salt. I eat the first
buttery few letting them linger on my tongue
even sweeter and more needed than in those
ignorant, innocent, halcyon days.

by Carol A. Amato

Editor’s Note: This narrative poem makes an ordinary task, done many times, feel utterly important given the context of the greater world’s wars and tragedy.

Counselors in Fryeberg, Maine, 1965

Along the trail to our cabins
night was a pitch-black penetrable
wall us tripping over roots like leggy
limbs wrapped wantonly around one
another no foothold of ground between
them us slipping breathless in the drama
to stay up our eyes searching for a
cabin’s lamp glow to guide us ‘though
it was lights out for the campers.

On clear nights the moon was swallowed
by towering pine’s needle arms touching
one another, grown close and conspiratorial
as thieves enveloping us with their sharp
scent like strong menthol drops piercing
the nose and throat with each intake of
cold August night air

far more pungent
than Caroline’s pine tree hanging from her
car mirror on days off joyful to be able to
smoke freely heading to Conway and once
even Kennebunkport over the speed limit
and the welcome of the bright lights of
the highway heading back.

The next day, drawing en plein air with them
their congregations of pines Crayola Forest Green,
Laser Lemon slants of light piercing the Sepia earth
full of our young selves that almost end of summer
just before fall with all its extravagant dying and us
facing unpredictable perhaps outrageous changes

the pines, in dark and light, shedding needles
when they must, still green and steadfast.

by Carol A. Amato

Editor’s Note: The idyllic wonder detailed in this poem evokes nostalgia for a moment in time that we can only hope will endure as we go through life.

A Small Bird

A small bird’s egg tooth pokes light
into that safe darkness.

She rises wet from the jagged shell
to see the cold awareness of stars,
an imperfect egg moon.

She feels the weight of mother
love above her, transient as
the broken fragments and the swirl
of feathers beneath her.

The nestlings grow quickly
the constancy of protein stuffed
often into their gaping mouths
(unlovely the caterwauling of need)
readying to test the sky.

Except for her.

She watches as they lift from their
boney home to join the flock
jostling for space on the high wire
paralleling the divided highway
dark sentinels facing into the wind.

In a sudden
they rise together conjoined as one
whirling and veering
slanting in and out of clouds
the swarm like a cult of bees
impenetrable and unquestioning.

She feels the pull of a gentle wind
lifting her maiden feathers into
a prophetic V.

Balanced on the nest edge
she leaps into that rarefied air
soaring on her own wings into
the swirling thermals toward the bold
new moon and the intrepid stars
like her
a small brave bird.

by Carol A. Amato

Editor’s Note: The imagery in this poem feels like allegory, but even if it isn’t, the narrative of the small brave bird is one many of us need right now.

Baseball in Connecticut

I knew the feeling as well as any boy
hunched over home plate, a flat rock,
legs apart, left in front, bend the knees,
bat back and hands choked up a lot
(the bat was never kid-sized)
hat low squinting against the glare
silent six-word metronome ticking
keep your eye on the ball
keep your eye on the ball.

Bases loaded.
Timmy’s hard-ball pitch the same as
when he hurled rocks in our rock fight
wars at Red Rock Quarry still aiming
more for the head than over the plate.

For every concussion he ever
gave my little brother
I swung on the first count,
the crack
electric sting in my palms
the whirl of frayed ball
over the splintered benches
and me sliding to home
a girl
gladly eating dirt.

by Carol A. Amato

Editor’s Note: The narrative voice of this poem combines the adult with the girl, and hooks the reader into the triumphant home run.

See-saw, Margery Daw

You of a certain age remember it
the long wooden board balanced on
a metal fulcrum and holding-on bars
at either end still cold in summer.

You and a friend of approximate
weight taking turns pushing off
with your legs lifting one of you up
to then fall fast and the thrill in your
gut like invading butterflies, the same
whoop you felt when your father sped
down a high hill just so you could have
that joy.

‘See-saw, Margery Daw
Johnny shall have a new master.
He shall not have a penny a day
Because he can’t saw any faster.’

You learned much later there was no
Margery Daw but sawyers with a two-
person saw, singing it again and again.
Discovered too that those highs
wouldn’t last, like your Dad
who forgot all about joy.

And the chubby dimpled cousin
who always got the better of you
but couldn’t get off the ground.
We laughed hard at her
mean little bastards that we were
and never did feel sorry.

Rusty, too, the kid with so many freckles
they melded into a brown face-puddle
smirking as he jumped off sending you
plummeting to the ground too late for
the rescue of legs, banging the board on
the macadam not cushioned with wood
chips or bouncy rubbery surfaces
slamming your teeth together
the jarring jolt pain shots into your head.

Don’t cry.
Don’t tell your mother.
Fight your own battles, fists if needed
hiding the bruises from her when you
came home after dark long after being
called in to a now cold dinner or maybe
none.

by Carol A. Amato

Editor’s Note: The careful imagery in this poem sets the framework for the emotional punches that surprise the reader (the father who “forgot all about joy,” the bullying, and the lonely last line). This poem feels real, because it is.

Destiny of the Lone Hunter

What I didn’t see was the vast length
of wing-spread and the slow deep
wing-beats planing down in a wide circle
legs outstretched, descending to the pond’s
edge accordion-folded wings against its
muted blue-gray plumage

but now
ankle deep in the silt of last fall’s leaf litter
and instantly statue-still without perceptible
movement
spear-beak poised
dark pin-prick eyes able to discern the slightest
sign of life disturbing its own reflection and the
sky’s along whose borders this fall’s wild rage of
colors will soon become air-borne confetti.

Unfazed by useless beauty, the heron,
one stilt-leg lifted, bends its sinuous neck
then lightning-strikes the stalked-for prey
it swallows whole.
All that matters in the scheme of things:
the rewards of forbearance and efficiency.

It will return here until all but the oak leaves
have fallen and a transparent film of ice
forms around its patient legs.
It may stay the winter
unknown by us mere mortals why
but respecting choices we admire:
pluck and persistence and perhaps
faith in open water

or instead lift off graceful and strong fading soon
into the layered clouds and pushed by southerly
winds those beneficent purveyors of unpredictable
destinies.

by Carol A. Amato

Editor’s Note: Detailed imagery moves this poem from simple snapshot to philosophical memoir.

In Sicily, On the Road to Gela

By summer, they had grown into masses
of tall ragged opium poppies mostly
red but here and there pink and purple petals
fluttering below the sunflowers.

Here, on the road to Gela
stinking town of chemicals and tangled steel
she sits on a wrought-iron stool
by the side of the road
short black shorts, bosoms spilling from black lace,
red stilettos defining her smooth black legs.

A car slows.
The few words are negotiated.
She slides next to him and through the window
looks toward the blanket of poppies,
thin crepe skins folding too easily into themselves
fragile, she thinks, and without substance
unlike the firm succulence of lilies
or even the brave peonies crashing to their deaths
in the sweet blush of life.

Lying on her back in that numb drudgery
she can see the impossible stars
and in the deeper dark behind her eyes
the old greenhouse
dried poppies in a pot
the tiny black seeds escaping
through the holes.

by Carol A. Amato

Editor’s Note: This poem begins simply, but the narrative soon tangles into a complicated pattern of difficulty, presented with the most lovely, spare imagery, that a reader will be left reeling by the last line.